Something very special happens when people from a region come into living contact with each other, face-to-face. In responding not only to each other’s uniqueness, but also to the unique features of their shared surroundings, they create between them, first-time events that are a rich mixture of all these influences. Aspects of these events can, if they are attended to and developed, function as the beginnings of new and productive relations in the region. Researchers can help regional members set the scene for such meetings, help to draw attention to the creative events to which they give rise, and, by an appropriate use of language, help participants articulate their relations to their surroundings in ways which take account of local particularities and details. Researchers in this sphere, thus, assume a somewhat unusual role. Rather than as external observers seeking to understand radically hidden processes that can only be understood inferentially, through the terms of a theory, researchers become interested partners in the process of development. As such, they come to work, not in terms of concepts, principles, or theories worked out in laboratories or seminar rooms ahead of time, but in terms of the self-same dynamic, scenic-sense of the region as a “relational-landscape of developmental opportunities” as all the other participants within it. It is this shared overall scenic-sense of the region that researchers help participants develop in the “dialogue conferences” they facilitate. This kind of shared, dialogically-structured, synoptic sense of a region, shared between all those actively living and working in it, is quite different from what has been sought in the past.
Learning Change 